I received an email from one of the genealogical sites that I subscribe to, revealing that my paternal grandfather, Raymond Dellinger has been drafted for WWI. This is his draft paper.
I am not 100% sure but I don’t think that he was actually sent to war. Lucky for him as so many veterans of WWI died of battle wounds and disease. I was intrigued that he was a bank clerk in Nebraska. His older sister had married a doctor from Nebraska but the family had previously lived in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. My grandfather was born on the Chickasaw nation in OK.
I never had the opportunity to meet this Grandpa and he died when I was a child. He was so handsome with gray eyes that I would have loved to have seen him in person. Now I know where the recessive gene for my blue gray eyes comes from. My father had brown eyes and my mum had blue.
Grandpa Dellinger
As I am looking at the WWI drafts I see that 20 more relatives had been drafted into the war. I do not know how many actually fought but my great uncle Earl (grandpa’s brother) was a Marine and fought in the Battle of Managua, 1927. Then an incorrectly spelled name caught my attention, a distant cousin named Tony Ortiga (Ortega). His draft fell into a strange category of Indians, Insane and Prisoners. Well, in my family it could be all three….but what awful world categorizes those groups together? It was Folsom Prison in Tony’s case. I wonder what he did? Be careful when you open the genealogical closet because you never know what skeleton will fall out.
As I was reading this sad draft, I could hear Johnny Cash playing at Folsom prison.
‘When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry’
Somehow that is the perfect segue from my last post on trains to this one on Memorial Day.
Lest we forget. Rest in Peace.